TV previews.

Dashed Hopes

Show Follows A Family's Struggle With Alzheimer's

How's this for an unlikely television heroine: a Wisconsin woman in her late 80s, delightfully plainspoken during her lucid moments but tragically addled too much of the time.

Only the woman's name, Ruth Hammer, is television perfect; she even sounds like a Ruth Hammer in her repeated and wrenching insistence that she be allowed to remain in her house, despite evidence that it has become a dangerous place for her.

Hammer is the real-life grandmother of Chicago filmmaker Cary Stauffacher. In the independently produced "Something Should Be Done about Grandma Ruthie" (10 p.m. Tuesday, WTTW-Ch. 11), Stauffacher chronicles with compassion and insight her family's painful grappling with what Alzheimer's disease has done to her mother's mother.

"Eunice," the filmmaker's mother says to a nurse on the phone, "it's what's left of Joan Hammer Stauffacher speaking."

"You don't go through this and come out the same," Joan tells her camera-wielding daughter at another moment.

It is testimony to the emotional force of Stauffacher's storytelling that comments like these do not seem remotely self-pitying. She recognizes and underscores the tale's inherent drama: a tug between a widow's wishes and the halting comprehension of grim duty by those around her; the family's repeatedly dashed hopes that intermittent solutions will somehow make this easier.

It is a moving story not just for the millions who have seen someone they love virtually disappear from view under the effects of Alzheimer's, again in the broad public consciousness for laying waste to the faculties of Ronald Reagan. It speaks to anyone who has had to cope with questions about care for their aged kin.

Complicating matters for Hammer's adult son and daughter is that they must deal with the situation from their homes in far-flung towns. Yes, there is the testimony of their mother's befuddled behavior from neighbors, and even the children's own experience of receiving confused phone calls from Hammer. But when they come to visit she seems strong, defiant, even, as one doctor says of her, "irascible."

"It all sounds like a lot of baloney to me, the whole damn thing," she tells family at one point. "The best solution is to leave me alone."

But that is clearly an impossible answer. Ruth Hammer dwindles even as the film, completed in 1993, progresses. At first she needs help with matters like the days of the week, a need the woman next door meets by putting flashcards in her window for Hammer's easy reference. Later, she insists that three men sleep on her roof and use her bathroom. Stauffacher finds a note Hammer has posted on the door she believes the men use: "No outside guests," reads the frail handwriting. "Thank you."

What's remarkable about this is that Ruth Hammer never disappears from view, never becomes that person in the room whom others refer to in the third person.

Stauffacher's video camera repeatedly offers glimpses into her grandmother's embattled psyche. Sometimes this is done with eerily effective point-of-view compositions: a blurred field of vision after an increase in medication, for instance, or objects losing their familiar edges. Sometimes it shows through in Hammer's wily determination to hold on to what she has known.

This is the kind of deeply personal film that is especially effective on television, yet the medium almost never presents. I would have liked even a little more of Stauffacher herself, such as the moment when, in her role as a seemingly reluctant narrator, she confesses to admiration for her grandmother's unreasonable will. It's a feeling viewers will likely share.

- Baseball may still be nine days away, but "Baseball" is back. If you missed it in September, here's the chance to see Ken Burns' 18 1/2-hour documentary, the most watched series in PBS history. It will air on successive Mondays for 10 weeks, starting tonight (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) and skipping only May 8 when a new epic documentary, about settling the West, will air. Burns' brother, the prodigiously talented Ric Burns, directed that one.